In-depth editorial profiles of the people who shape great organisations: the context, the defining decisions, and the durable lessons. 29 leaders and counting, from founders and operators to chairs and CEOs.
Bupa's Teresa Huang has built a career on two unfashionable convictions, that customers would rather hold a rough thing today than a perfect thing later, and that platform leaders have to hop two steps before anyone believes their work creates value.
A PhD immunologist who walked out of the lab and into product, Liz Blink has spent fifteen years building a quietly radical case, that the thing most worth investing in isn't the roadmap or the framework, but the product people themselves.
From a chip shop on the edge of the Wentworth estate to general management at SEEK and a software venture of his own, Rob Alford has spent twenty years chasing a single, stubborn idea, that the best leaders don't move fastest, they decide best.
An industrial designer who built a hundred-billion-dollar company out of three air mattresses, Brian Chesky spent a decade being told to hire good people and get out of their way. When that advice nearly broke Airbnb, he did the opposite, and inadvertently gave Silicon Valley a new name for an old idea.
Most leaders nod along when you say a company should be user-centred. Alex Burke, the CEO of the Wellington-built research platform Optimal Workshop, is interested in the harder question that comes next: can you actually prove what that research is worth?
Leaders Loop